baldaquin.gui — Basic GUI elements#

This module provides all the basic building blocks for the advanced GUI widgets.

Low-level widgets#

At the lowest level, the module provides a number of classes that act as lightweight wrappers over standard Qt widget, with the twofold purpose of enforcing consistency in the overall look and feel of the interface and minimizing boilerplate code:

  • Button represents a simple button equipped with an icon, and is used in the ControlBar;

  • DataWidgetBase is the basic (abstract) building block for mapping key-value pairs: it is nothing more than a pair of widget—a QLabel holding a title and a generic widget holding some data—arranged in a vertical layout.

Displaying data#

The DisplayWidget is the simplest DataWidgetBase subclass, and also the basic building block for displaying data in a read-only fashion. The specific widget holding the value is a QLabel.

DisplayWidget object are seldom instantiated directly, and their most common incarnation, by far, is the CardWidget, inspired to the material design guidelines at https://material.io/components/cards. Cards are surfaces that display content and actions on a single topic and, for our purposes, cards are basically QFrame objects holding a vertical layout to which we attach DisplayWidget instances. Cards are typically driven by Enum objects, along the lines of

class MyCardField(Enum):

    EGGS = 'Eggs'
    SPAM = 'Spam'

class MyCard(CardWidget):

    _FIELD_ENUM = MyCardField

Among the specific sub-classes that the module provides (and that can be a good source of inspiration as to what is the level of flexibility of this approach) are:

  • RunControlCard;

  • EventHandlerCard.

See also

baldaquin.runctrl — Run control, baldaquin.event — Event handler.

Displaying configurations#

The module provides a series of custom widgets for the purpose of displaying configuration parameters, designed to interact natively with instances of the ConfigurationBase abstract class:

  • ParameterCheckBox, mapping to bool parameters;

  • ParameterSpinBox, mapping to int parameters;

  • ParameterDoubleSpinBox, mapping to float parameters;

  • ParameterLineEdit, mapping to str parameters with no choices constraints;

  • ParameterComboBox, mapping to str parameters with choices constraints.

These widgets, too, are seldom instantiated directly, and live more commonly within ConfigurationWidget objects, where they are dinamically mapped to the proper parameter types within a given configuration object.

See also

baldaquin.config — Configuration.

Embedding matplotlib#

The PlotCanvasWidget is the main resource to embed a matplotlib figure, along the lines of the documentation at https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/user_interfaces/embedding_in_qt_sgskip.html.

This specific widget is equipped with a QTimer object that can be used to manage the updating of the underlying plot within an event loop.

The control bar#

The ControlBar is deigned to manage the run control from a GUI environment and implements the same exact semantics of the finite-state machine upon which the latter is based. It emits four different signals

  • set_reset_triggered ()

  • set_stopped_triggered ()

  • set_running_triggered ()

  • set_paused_triggered ()

and each one is connected at runtime to the proper change of state in the run control.

The main window#

Module documentation#